Novelist Andy Conway became a favourite of ours with his excellent novel of execrable teenage excretia*, The Girl with the Bomb Inside. Not for teens too much then. It tracked so perfectly, so audaciously, I grimaced. Other readers blanched and blushed as we came through, our memories of cool, cool indignity stripped bare. Hail to these teens we cried, these once and future teens. Just not us.
If you’ve ever been young beyond your years, you’d know.
More recently, Andy’s become known for his Touchstone series of time travel novels, romance raging through time. I’d hate to say his work has matured as I cannot bring myself to infer anything that suggests the straightahead clipped Bomb Girl could be bettered. The Touchstone collection though is artfully immense, intensely crafted like substantial, hand-finished furniture, only these mortices are polished to shred, not harmonize. And so dovetailing nicely from the first Touchstone series is a new novel, Buried In Time, not a sequel nor a prequel, but a substantial sidebar. A noirish Victorian crime thriller, set in Birmingham in 1888, a mere two months before Jack the Ripper’s rampage began in Whitechapel. And there’s your clue.
Jack the Ripper takes a trip to Birmingham. Well you already knew he could purportedly be, would be, a celebrated son of Stourbridge, so he’s a local already. Just like the infamous others - to be mentioned in the same breath, Johnny Briggs, Ashley Young, Clint Mansell and Robert Plant at times, although none reaching Jack’s notoriety no. But odious, still?
Balkanizing his own oeuvre with massively great aplomb, Buried in Time explores the real identity and roots of the Ripper, and the curious week he spent in the Birmingham area.
READING ALERT
Andy Conway reads an excerpt from Buried in Time at the launch of New Street Authors, a new independent literary cabal taking shape in Birmingham. The launch of the group with multiple readers, links and discussions of resources and so on, is a FREE EVENT but please reserve a place at Eventbrite
New Street Authors
Monday 13 July 2015 – 7.30pm
The Dark Horse, Moseley, Birmingham B13 8JP
Find out more about NewStreetAuthors, here
OTHER WAY IMPORTANT LINKS
it's Andy Conway Week at Outsideleft
Andy's website is here
Get Buried in Time on Amazon, here
*From the latin, it’s all shit there’s only different depths “semper in excretia sumus solim profundum variat” (Lord de Ramsey) but truncated so as not to spoil the flow doe.
